Program explores war's effects on young

NEW YORK {AP} A 12-year-old Bosnian boy was at home with his family when a bomb hit. As we can see when he raises his stump to the camera, the shell claimed most of his left arm.

"I didn't cry," the boy says in an on-screen translation, "because it could have been worse."

How well he knows. The war in Bosnia, lasting three years, killed an estimated 15,000 children.

And during the past decade, some 2 million children died in wars around the world. Appallingly, many of those youngsters were targeted by the enemy.

So says "Children in War," a disturbing report on the effects of armed conflict on its youngest, most helpless victims. But this isn't a story of numbers. It's a personal tragedy told by children trying to survive or recover in Bosnia, Rwanda, Israel and Northern Ireland.

"We had an idea that we could give them the voice in the film," says Alan Raymond, who made "Children in War" with his wife, Susan. "That way, we see the war through their eyes and experiences. And we dignify them as people."

Their film premieres at 9 p.m. Monday on HBO (Cox Cable Channel 68).

The conflict in Bosnia was dreadful but relatively short-lived. By contrast, bloodshed has been a part of daily life for children on both sides of the Middle East divide since Israel was founded a half-century ago.

We meet 12-year-old Moaz, who in 1994 was praying in a West Bank mosque when his father became one of 29 Muslims killed by a Jewish extremist.

"My father is gone," says the boy, "and my memories of him are fading."

We meet a 12-year-old Israeli girl, whose brother lies in critical condition after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up a bus in Jerusalem.

Susan Raymond gently asks the girl how she feels about the person who did this thing.

"I am angry at him," she girl replies. "But he's dead."

In Belfast, Northern Ireland, a Catholic girl lives beside an 18-foot-high "peace wall" that separates her neighborhood from a Protestant community.

"I would love to go into a Protestant area (and) have Protestant friends," she says.

Then a little boy on the other side speaks of missing his father, a member of a Protestant paramilitary group serving 16 years for conspiracy to "kill a Catholic."

The Raymonds take us to Rwanda, where, in just three months of mass killings by Hutu extremists in 1994, more than a half-million Tutsis were slain, including 300,000 children.

There we meet a 5-year-old survivor who, along with her murdered parents, was left to die from three vicious machete blows. Of her attackers, the girl says, "They saw us and they came and killed us."

We glimpse a great filled-in pit, a mass grave bearing the remains of some 4,000 victims. Then, across the road, we see a grade school in session.

All the students are orphans. All their parents are buried in that grave.

Whatever their homeland, the kids in the interviews are strikingly well-spoken, and, with few exceptions, they are poised, even eerily stoic, as they touch on their traumas.

"If the soldier who killed my father also has a child," says a Bosnian girl in a refugee camp, "I hope his child does not have to suffer the way I have had to." But just how much she has suffered she doesn't let on. Perhaps she can't.

The Raymonds spent five years on "Children In War," making a total of nine trips between 1994 and 1996 to their chosen trouble spots.

In the past, they have produced and directed 14 documentaries, including their landmark 13-hour profile of the Loud family, which premiered on PBS a quarter-century ago as "An American Family."

Once again, they shared the tasks of producing, directing, writing and editing. Alan was photographer, while Susan handled interviews, narration and sound.